On July 26, 2026, one of the year's most talked-about art exhibitions will close - and its central work never arrived. "Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds" has been on view at the Jewish Museum in New York since March 20. In the gallery designed for the watercolor Angelus Novus, an authorized copy hangs in a recessed red panel. The original remains in Jerusalem. The story says something important about why a Paul Klee poster carries far more weight than its soft blocks of color might first suggest.
Klee is one of those artists whose work sells well as posters precisely because the images look light and easy. Arrows, fish, moons, little houses in rows, fields of color drifting into one another. But the Klee on view in New York this summer is different: works from his final ten years, made by a man who had lost his job, his country, and finally control of his own hands. It is this part of his output that explains why his line looks the way it does.
Quick facts: "Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds" is on view at the Jewish Museum in New York from March 20 to July 26, 2026, with around 100 paintings and drawings, in collaboration with Zentrum Paul Klee and Kunstmuseum Bern. It is the first American museum exhibition to focus entirely on Klee's final decade, up to his death in 1940.
Angelus Novus that never arrived - the empty space that became the exhibition's most powerful gallery
Angelus Novus is a small thing. Oil and watercolor transferred onto paper, painted in 1920, barely larger than an A4 sheet. The philosopher Walter Benjamin bought it the following year and carried it with him throughout his restless life. In his ninth thesis in "On the Concept of History," written shortly before his death in 1940, Benjamin described the figure as the angel of history: its face turned toward the past, its gaze fixed on a single ongoing catastrophe, while a storm from paradise drives it backward into the future. That interpretation turned an unassuming watercolor into one of the most cited works of art of the 20th century.
Since 1987, the work has belonged to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it is kept under strict climate-controlled conditions. Because the paper is sensitive to light, it may be displayed for only four weeks at a time. The plan was to alternate the facsimile with the original during the exhibition. But the war in the Middle East and disrupted air connections made transport impossible, and visitors in New York are instead greeted by a copy in an otherwise empty gallery.
An exhibition about an artist driven into exile by history has its central work halted by the history of the present day - the empty space on the wall says almost more than the painting would have.
From Bauhaus blackboards to exile: ten years that reshaped Klee's visual language
Paul Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in Münchenbuchsee outside Bern, the son of a music teacher and a singer. He was a skilled violinist and for a long time considered a career in music. His choice of painting did not mean music disappeared; his compositions are often built like scores, with rhythms, repetitions, and pauses.
Between 1921 and 1931, he taught at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar and then in Dessau. His teaching notes fill several thousand pages and are considered among the 20th century's most important theoretical texts on visual art, comparable to Leonardo's sketchbooks. Anyone who wants to see how the school's visual language lives on today can find its legacy in our collection of Bauhaus posters, and the style's full history is covered in our guide to Bauhaus as an interior design style.
In 1931, Klee left the Bauhaus for a professorship at the art academy in Düsseldorf. In 1933, when the National Socialists came to power, he was dismissed. The Nazi press falsely called him a "Galician Jew." He returned to Bern, to the country where he had been born but never granted citizenship. His application for Swiss citizenship was approved only after his death. In 1937, seventeen of his works were shown in the propaganda exhibition "Degenerate Art" in Munich, and more than a hundred works were confiscated from German museum collections.
The disease that changed his strokes - why his later pictures look thicker
In 1935, Klee fell ill with scleroderma, an autoimmune disease that gradually hardens the skin and eventually stiffens the hands and face. The effect is immediately visible in his pictures. The fine, trembling line that characterized the 1920s gives way to broad, almost calligraphic strokes in black, laid over muted fields of color. Many see this as a deliberate change in style. Just as much, it reflects what a stiffening hand can actually do.
Still, this was his most productive period. In 1939 alone, he produced over twelve hundred works - more than in any other year of his career, and more than some artists make in an entire lifetime. His total output is estimated at around nine thousand works. He died on June 29, 1940, in Muralto near Locarno, aged 60.
The New York exhibition isn’t the only reason Klee is in the spotlight right now. During the winter, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid showed around fifty masterpieces by Picasso and Klee side by side from the Heinz Berggruen Collection, arranged around four themes: portraits and masks, places, things, and harlequins and nudes. Berggruen, who left Berlin in 1936 and built one of the most important private collections of the 20th century, owned a large number of Klee’s works. The fact that he collected both artists says something about how close they were in their thinking about how much an image really needs to show to work.
The motifs in his later pictures recur: angels, masks, cryptic signs that resemble writing without actually being writing. Some seem decipherable; others resist interpretation. That very resistance is one reason the pictures hold their place on a wall year after year. Research into why the brain is drawn to certain motifs describes the same balance between recognition and mystery, which we explore in our article about processing fluency and why some art feels beautiful.
Color and the square: Klee’s building blocks and journey to Tunisia
The turning point in Klee’s use of color is usually dated to April 1914, when he traveled to Tunisia with August Macke and Louis Moilliet. In his diary, he wrote the sentence that has since been quoted countless times: color and he had become one; he was a painter. The light he encountered in Kairouan and Hammamet led him to abandon the linear and build images out of colored squares instead.
The square became his basic unit. In the so-called magic squares, fields of color are placed side by side in a grid where each square affects its neighbor. In practice, this is a visual exploration of the same idea that his Bauhaus colleague Josef Albers later systematized: how a color changes character depending on what lies beside it. Klee worked extensively in watercolor and in the oil-transfer technique he developed himself, creating a translucent, layered surface that is hard to confuse with anyone else’s.
The connection with Wassily Kandinsky is not just stylistic. The two were colleagues at the Bauhaus and lived for a time in the same duplex in Dessau. Kandinsky turns 160 in 2026, and we’ve written a separate article about Kandinsky and the birth of abstract art.
Tips: Klee’s color squares need space to work. If you hang a 30x40 in a narrow passage, viewers will see only individual squares. Give the artwork at least two meters of viewing distance, or go up to 50x70 so the rhythm of the grid can be read as a whole.
Klee on Swedish walls - formats, rooms, and colors that work together
Klee is unusually easy to decorate with, for three reasons. First, his palette is muted even when it is colorful: ochre, brick, muted turquoise, and soft gray are close to the earthy tones that have dominated Swedish homes in recent years. Second, the images rarely have a clear center, which means they can hang alongside other things without competing for attention. Third, they work in pairs and groups of three, because the grid structure creates a natural rhythm between the image surfaces.
Where the images work best
The late, symbol-filled works are remarkably effective in a home office. They have enough detail to give the eye somewhere to rest between tasks, without being so narrative that they steal focus. In the bedroom, the earlier watercolors with their transparent layers work best. In a living room with lots of wood and textiles, a single larger Klee-inspired composition provides the graphic counterbalance the room often lacks.
One room that is often overlooked in this context is the hallway. It almost never gets daylight, and many colorful images fall flat there because they are intended for natural light. Klee’s muted layers fare significantly better under warm white lighting than pure primary colors do, precisely because the fields of color are already toned down with gray and ochre. The same applies to stairwells and other passageways where viewers move past rather than stop. Simpler grid compositions work better there than the symbol-filled late works, because the eye has time to take in a structure but not a story.
Frame and mount
Keep the frame narrow and neutral. Black metal or light oak both work, but avoid gold and wide profiles - they give the image a museum-like tone that competes with the clean geometries. A generous mount, three to five centimeters wide, significantly enhances the effect, especially with smaller formats, as it gives the fields of color room to breathe. If you want to build on this with related styles, abstract posters and graphic posters pair well with the geometric style, and in artworks by famous artists you’ll find more names from modernism.
Frequently asked questions about Paul Klee and his art
Klee left behind a visual language that few artists have managed to imitate without it showing. What looks playful is the result of ten years teaching at the Bauhaus, thousands of pages of theory, and ultimately a hand that stopped obeying him. If you’d like to bring home something of that combination of seriousness and lightness, find a starting point among our abstract posters and in the Bauhaus collection. Learn more about the artist at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern or on Google Arts and Culture.